Well there's a couple of problems with public funding...
With a 100% subsidy, a student becomes a passive party to the economic activity. That's financially beneficial for the public at large, however the students now have much less bargaining power and the education they wish to attain could become jeopardized by mismanagement and political whim.
I think my alternative would follow like so: First, the University should have absolutely no right to the economic state of a student. Secondly, students should be paid their loans and grants directly after being admitted to a University. Third, the students would pay tuition monies to a third party who would then bulk-pay the University every six weeks based on total attendance. Lastly, Universities must accept transfer students from other universities within it's accreditation agency after the first year - however they may choose which ones to accept based on grades. This means that if 10 students apply to transfer, and there are only 4 spots open, then the University can pick which ones to accept based on grades.
I think this solves both problem - it eliminates the ability of the University to price-gouge (because students can shop for cheaper and better educations), and it fully funds the University based on attendance - which means that it would require students to attend classes. Students that don't attend are replaced by those that will attend.
First, The Pell grant is in fact a subsidy with no repayment. Secondly, the government pays interest on your student loans during your education. Thirdly, it can be argued that most students wouldn't qualify for a loan without the government as co-signer.
That closing has everything to do to the abject moral qualifications of the Legionnaires of Christ, and nothing to do with actual financial failure. (When your founding Catholic priest turns out to be a married with children the flock gets a bit irate!)
My point is that higher education is a bang-on profitable business, as compared to say running a sandwich shop.
Anytime a government subsidizes a product or service - the price will increase to match the subsidy. Period. The producers know how much the subsidy is(A), and how much a consumer can spend(B). They will always add a+b in the end because the elasticity of price can be known to support that level.
There isn't even an unknown pricing curve here - the University already knows your finances when you apply for financial aid. They can simply and easily price an education to target the population of students they want.
How many (fiscally) bankrupt universities have you seen lately? I only know of Huron University in South Dakota in 2005.
He's one of those fucking crazy idiots who thinks that economies magically regulate themselves.
While your ostensibly right - your also wrong. Regulation has been utterly decimated by the corporate-political partnership over the past few decades. What's left of regulation is used as a competitive barrier by the large corporations.
For instance, Toyota lobbied in 2007 to keep low CAFE fuel standards in the USA. Why? To keep US automakers at a competitive disadvantage.
Meredith Baker, former FCC commissioner, was co-opted to approve a monopolistic merger and promptly was hired by the companies she formerly regulated.
The Federal Reserve bank, itself a private bank, approves mergers and acquisitions while at the same time having those very members on it's own managerial boards.
When I was a kid I was a firm believer in government regulation and a public-private system of corporate governance... but now all I see is unrestrained and unfettered insanity. To call this capitalism is an insult to Marxist Philosophy.
Oh please... your state's DOT ***ALREADY*** maintains those freeways. Sure, there is federal funding - but that money is generally money that bounces back to the state from federal fuel taxes already.
The Federal Government uses that bounce back as a noose on your state government right now. If your state pisses on the Feds, they don't get all their money back... e.g. Louisiana.
Highway maintenance is primarily a function of state and local governments. The federal government spends relatively small amounts ($70 million annually) on national parks, Indian reservations, and other federal lands. For local governments - counties, towns, cities - road and street maintenance is their largest expense item.
Most likely, there are unseen contracts between Nokia and Microsoft that forbid any mention of new products before release. Such things have happened before when the iPhone was first released - an AT&T manager was let go for saying that it was "great."
It's definitely a RISC processor set... the problem with the Itanium was the EPIC instruction set. A complete waste of time, as the compiler is asked to generalize decisions about the thread and multi-core state of the machine during program compilation.
I mean... who the hell thought that was a good idea? It makes for a nice benchmark, but a terrible architecture. Bring us back the Alpha chip... make it a 64 core monster.
They'd include a link to buy a copyright license right next to the download. Might as well earn their buck or two where the people get their shows. Sell a reloadable card at 7-11 for people that want to be anonymous. It's about timing and convenience. Let the download service keep 15 cents.
Thanks Rob for giving us all your time and effort. Thanks for sharing your experiences, your ideas and your fervent hope in better tech, better science and all things awesome.
I think we only chatted a couple of times at random Linux conferences, but I was always in awe that you bootstrapped slashdot from practically nothing. Of course having great friends helped, I'm sure.
SO one final thanks - you did awesome. Hope to see you about!
: Catholics have used the fourfold method of exegesis and Jews have Rabinnical texts - they still want to believe that the whole Bible is literal and that God through his holy scribes was incapible of metaphor?
We still love our Christian brothers and sisters - even when they're uncomforttible eating Dino-shaped chicken nuggets.
Straight on! We moved the hell away from the big city when we had kids. I moved 13 times during my childhood and became an expert at hiding in the corner. I graduated from a top ten public school in the nation, and also attended a few bottom rung schools as well - so my experience in many different situations only vindicated my decision.
I think children(and parents) are being mentally warped by a massive system of bureaucratic legalese which goes from "nose in the corner", to criminal at 50mph. Parents are stuck in school systems where they have ZERO input. Your complaints are properly filed in/dev/null. As a parent you are constantly being scrutinized, your children are always being tested and they are not developing a full set of logical and rational skills in such an environment. Why? Because it's impossible!
This is my experience - the parents should practically *OWN* the schools their kids attend. They should be volunteering all the time. They should be serving food, they should be running the PTA, and they should know their kids friends, and the other parents.
There should be an elected school board for *every* school in the district. Suddenly the parents have a real vested interest in the school, they can budget and cut - and now the teachers work for the parents. Instead of 9 people ruling over hundreds of schools, you have 9 actual parents running a single school. Let the district handle buildings, busses and lunches, and the parents handle the education and associated resources.
These companies that outsourced for cheap didn't reinvest in technologies - they just rode a wave of cheap exports. All the while, the expertise in development and manufacturing was moving offshore. They reaped enormous profits during the short term, but they didn't reinvest locally and abroad with those profits.
Successful companies opened up labs in India, Taiwan and China and actively competed for talent. The most successful companies aggregate their talent on the network and build relationships wherever the opportunities arise.
I recently worked with a big company on a new chip platform launch - the software team is in Ireland, Austin, and Israel. I work with the lab in the US, but I can quickly get bugs and questions ironed out across numerous disciplines (hardware, software, and everything in-between). It's fantastic - because they own the design and know what they're doing across the board. If they were simply rebadging imports it would likely take twice as long to hit the market.
Dell built it's first China lab in 2000, then setup a Taiwan lab in 2003. I think that they recognized the importance in integrated design teams pretty early (certainly better than HP who waited until 2005). I've gotten good support from Dell enterprise on Linux for a while now. It was pretty spotty in the beginning but now I've got no major complaints. Actually I think Dell is positioning themselves pretty well in the long term.
A gift from the down economy is that nobody expects miracle profits right now, so companies have a real choice to build up their capitol improvements and long-term outlooks should improve. Everyone knows competing for dollars is going to take a lot more work than selling PC's out of the trunk of a car.
The most successful companies of this century are going to utilize the talents where they come. They are going to reinvest those massive profits into their own product and services and support them during design, delivery and warranty. The ones that merely brand their products are going to be commoditized by their own suppliers.
Yup, I agree with this... I just think that anything out there with a VM language is a patent minefield these days... this includes all the JVM and.NET languages. Thinking that Oracle is any nicer than Microsoft is innocent folly, fraught with the same dangers of "intellectual property" land mines.
Apache and the OSS community would be much better off developing it's own VM languages in the first place and publishing profusely.
Cobol is not as dead as you think( think bureaucracy ) , Java is not the most popular language (C/C++ is), and stupid vendors can quickly kill even the most impressive technologies. The problem at Oracle is that they're treating everyone in the Java business as a competitor - not realizing or caring that Java is an open standard
Moreover Oracle all at once would like to leverage the huge base of companies who "need" java support into an Oracle support contract. But to do that they need to send out the brown-shirts to beat down all the "knockoff" organizations so that the big fish contracts will have no choice but to go to Oracle for new platform support.
Apache thinks they're all smug and smart over there - but in reality Oracle can just grab their code and wrap it up in support contracts and bundle it with hardware and OS support. After a while Oracle will come after them for Patent, Trademark, or copyright infringement (the trifecta of doom) - and after Apache looses badly - Oracle will demand ownership of all "java related technologies" - thus DEFEATING the SCOURGE of freedom.
All my predictions come true. Oh, prepare for mass starvation too. kthx.
Sorry, no you are wrong. And a massive goofball to boot.
I've worked at a few Fortune 100 companies - and they had no problem with me striking out parts of the employment contract. In fact they had me list my existing patents and list any ongoing non-work projects. I was free to modify my contract, as it's the law that both parties are free to modify terms. Working in Texas is helpful as well. Make sure you get a signed copy from them afterwards.
In order to control the hoi poloi you only need to target your propaganda at 10% of the population! That explains MTV and the huge amount of pressure and money poured into teens (around 7.19% of the US population as of 2008, or 21689114 teens total). With a rolling average of 7 years you could probably hit 10% with a 70% market penetration!
You forgot to mention that they only have a level 1 certification - which is the bare minimum set of requirements. The security library was developed by Certicom, - known as the "Security Builder FIPS Module."
Getting it certified was really just using the existing certification on a new platform - which only requires a security policy update, some known answer tests, and a run through of the self-testing framework (in some cases - the NIST is funny about that). No code review and not a lot of approved lab time is required for a platform port as long as the hardware is similar and software stays the same.
That's how they got it in and out of NIST in 3 months!
Uh, maybe because this course is for those seeking their 1 credit hour of computer science required to graduate - and likely the only language most of these folks will *ever* see or use is Javascript.
I think it's a fantastic idea actually. Yes, JS is convoluted and a bit strange. But, perhaps they will learn a thing or two as they go on to manage their fellow compsci graduates in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Well there's a couple of problems with public funding...
With a 100% subsidy, a student becomes a passive party to the economic activity. That's financially beneficial for the public at large, however the students now have much less bargaining power and the education they wish to attain could become jeopardized by mismanagement and political whim.
I think my alternative would follow like so:
First, the University should have absolutely no right to the economic state of a student. Secondly, students should be paid their loans and grants directly after being admitted to a University. Third, the students would pay tuition monies to a third party who would then bulk-pay the University every six weeks based on total attendance. Lastly, Universities must accept transfer students from other universities within it's accreditation agency after the first year - however they may choose which ones to accept based on grades. This means that if 10 students apply to transfer, and there are only 4 spots open, then the University can pick which ones to accept based on grades.
I think this solves both problem - it eliminates the ability of the University to price-gouge (because students can shop for cheaper and better educations), and it fully funds the University based on attendance - which means that it would require students to attend classes. Students that don't attend are replaced by those that will attend.
First we must have an inquisition.... Nobody would expect that!
First, The Pell grant is in fact a subsidy with no repayment. Secondly, the government pays interest on your student loans during your education. Thirdly, it can be argued that most students wouldn't qualify for a loan without the government as co-signer.
That closing has everything to do to the abject moral qualifications of the Legionnaires of Christ, and nothing to do with actual financial failure. (When your founding Catholic priest turns out to be a married with children the flock gets a bit irate!)
My point is that higher education is a bang-on profitable business, as compared to say running a sandwich shop.
Anytime a government subsidizes a product or service - the price will increase to match the subsidy. Period. The producers know how much the subsidy is(A), and how much a consumer can spend(B). They will always add a+b in the end because the elasticity of price can be known to support that level.
There isn't even an unknown pricing curve here - the University already knows your finances when you apply for financial aid. They can simply and easily price an education to target the population of students they want.
How many (fiscally) bankrupt universities have you seen lately? I only know of Huron University in South Dakota in 2005.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_universities_and_colleges_in_the_United_States
He's one of those fucking crazy idiots who thinks that economies magically regulate themselves.
While your ostensibly right - your also wrong. Regulation has been utterly decimated by the corporate-political partnership over the past few decades. What's left of regulation is used as a competitive barrier by the large corporations.
For instance, Toyota lobbied in 2007 to keep low CAFE fuel standards in the USA. Why? To keep US automakers at a competitive disadvantage.
Meredith Baker, former FCC commissioner, was co-opted to approve a monopolistic merger and promptly was hired by the companies she formerly regulated.
The Federal Reserve bank, itself a private bank, approves mergers and acquisitions while at the same time having those very members on it's own managerial boards.
When I was a kid I was a firm believer in government regulation and a public-private system of corporate governance... but now all I see is unrestrained and unfettered insanity. To call this capitalism is an insult to Marxist Philosophy.
I wonder why Ron Paul doesn't talk about slashing the military budget, it would appear the potential savings are enormous?
With the wars over, we would return to pre-war funding levels.... which is still a mountain of cash, but not Mt. Everest.
Oh please... your state's DOT ***ALREADY*** maintains those freeways. Sure, there is federal funding - but that money is generally money that bounces back to the state from federal fuel taxes already.
The Federal Government uses that bounce back as a noose on your state government right now. If your state pisses on the Feds, they don't get all their money back... e.g. Louisiana.
Highway maintenance is primarily a function of state and local governments. The federal government spends relatively small amounts ($70 million annually) on national parks, Indian reservations, and other federal lands. For local governments - counties, towns, cities - road and street maintenance is their largest expense item.
Get an education, fool. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/publicroads/98may/finance.cfm
I actually came up with my own deblurring algorithm based on the same type of idea just a few weeks ago. Glad to see it actually works!
Most likely, there are unseen contracts between Nokia and Microsoft that forbid any mention of new products before release. Such things have happened before when the iPhone was first released - an AT&T manager was let go for saying that it was "great."
It's definitely a RISC processor set... the problem with the Itanium was the EPIC instruction set. A complete waste of time, as the compiler is asked to generalize decisions about the thread and multi-core state of the machine during program compilation.
I mean... who the hell thought that was a good idea? It makes for a nice benchmark, but a terrible architecture. Bring us back the Alpha chip... make it a 64 core monster.
Google's acquisition of Motorola will be the final nail Steve Jobs' coffin.
Perhaps literally... ouch!
(I hope not!)
They'd include a link to buy a copyright license right next to the download. Might as well earn their buck or two where the people get their shows. Sell a reloadable card at 7-11 for people that want to be anonymous. It's about timing and convenience. Let the download service keep 15 cents.
They'd double their profits.... duh.
Thanks Rob for giving us all your time and effort. Thanks for sharing your experiences, your ideas and your fervent hope in better tech, better science and all things awesome.
I think we only chatted a couple of times at random Linux conferences, but I was always in awe that you bootstrapped slashdot from practically nothing. Of course having great friends helped, I'm sure.
SO one final thanks - you did awesome. Hope to see you about!
Oh now I get it... I guess the Fourfold Method of Exegesis is pretty modern then, eh?
: Catholics have used the fourfold method of exegesis and Jews have Rabinnical texts - they still want to believe that the whole Bible is literal and that God through his holy scribes was incapible of metaphor?
We still love our Christian brothers and sisters - even when they're uncomforttible eating Dino-shaped chicken nuggets.
Straight on! We moved the hell away from the big city when we had kids. I moved 13 times during my childhood and became an expert at hiding in the corner. I graduated from a top ten public school in the nation, and also attended a few bottom rung schools as well - so my experience in many different situations only vindicated my decision.
I think children(and parents) are being mentally warped by a massive system of bureaucratic legalese which goes from "nose in the corner", to criminal at 50mph. Parents are stuck in school systems where they have ZERO input. Your complaints are properly filed in /dev/null. As a parent you are constantly being scrutinized, your children are always being tested and they are not developing a full set of logical and rational skills in such an environment. Why? Because it's impossible!
This is my experience - the parents should practically *OWN* the schools their kids attend. They should be volunteering all the time. They should be serving food, they should be running the PTA, and they should know their kids friends, and the other parents.
There should be an elected school board for *every* school in the district. Suddenly the parents have a real vested interest in the school, they can budget and cut - and now the teachers work for the parents. Instead of 9 people ruling over hundreds of schools, you have 9 actual parents running a single school. Let the district handle buildings, busses and lunches, and the parents handle the education and associated resources.
These companies that outsourced for cheap didn't reinvest in technologies - they just rode a wave of cheap exports. All the while, the expertise in development and manufacturing was moving offshore. They reaped enormous profits during the short term, but they didn't reinvest locally and abroad with those profits.
Successful companies opened up labs in India, Taiwan and China and actively competed for talent. The most successful companies aggregate their talent on the network and build relationships wherever the opportunities arise.
I recently worked with a big company on a new chip platform launch - the software team is in Ireland, Austin, and Israel. I work with the lab in the US, but I can quickly get bugs and questions ironed out across numerous disciplines (hardware, software, and everything in-between). It's fantastic - because they own the design and know what they're doing across the board. If they were simply rebadging imports it would likely take twice as long to hit the market.
Dell built it's first China lab in 2000, then setup a Taiwan lab in 2003. I think that they recognized the importance in integrated design teams pretty early (certainly better than HP who waited until 2005). I've gotten good support from Dell enterprise on Linux for a while now. It was pretty spotty in the beginning but now I've got no major complaints. Actually I think Dell is positioning themselves pretty well in the long term.
A gift from the down economy is that nobody expects miracle profits right now, so companies have a real choice to build up their capitol improvements and long-term outlooks should improve. Everyone knows competing for dollars is going to take a lot more work than selling PC's out of the trunk of a car.
The most successful companies of this century are going to utilize the talents where they come. They are going to reinvest those massive profits into their own product and services and support them during design, delivery and warranty. The ones that merely brand their products are going to be commoditized by their own suppliers.
Yup, I agree with this... I just think that anything out there with a VM language is a patent minefield these days... this includes all the JVM and .NET languages. Thinking that Oracle is any nicer than Microsoft is innocent folly, fraught with the same dangers of "intellectual property" land mines.
Apache and the OSS community would be much better off developing it's own VM languages in the first place and publishing profusely.
Cobol is not as dead as you think( think bureaucracy ) , Java is not the most popular language (C/C++ is), and stupid vendors can quickly kill even the most impressive technologies. The problem at Oracle is that they're treating everyone in the Java business as a competitor - not realizing or caring that Java is an open standard
Moreover Oracle all at once would like to leverage the huge base of companies who "need" java support into an Oracle support contract. But to do that they need to send out the brown-shirts to beat down all the "knockoff" organizations so that the big fish contracts will have no choice but to go to Oracle for new platform support.
Apache thinks they're all smug and smart over there - but in reality Oracle can just grab their code and wrap it up in support contracts and bundle it with hardware and OS support. After a while Oracle will come after them for Patent, Trademark, or copyright infringement (the trifecta of doom) - and after Apache looses badly - Oracle will demand ownership of all "java related technologies" - thus DEFEATING the SCOURGE of freedom.
All my predictions come true. Oh, prepare for mass starvation too. kthx.
Heßischer you heathen!
Sorry, no you are wrong. And a massive goofball to boot.
I've worked at a few Fortune 100 companies - and they had no problem with me striking out parts of the employment contract. In fact they had me list my existing patents and list any ongoing non-work projects. I was free to modify my contract, as it's the law that both parties are free to modify terms. Working in Texas is helpful as well. Make sure you get a signed copy from them afterwards.
In order to control the hoi poloi you only need to target your propaganda at 10% of the population! That explains MTV and the huge amount of pressure and money poured into teens (around 7.19% of the US population as of 2008, or 21689114 teens total). With a rolling average of 7 years you could probably hit 10% with a 70% market penetration!
You forgot to mention that they only have a level 1 certification - which is the bare minimum set of requirements. The security library was developed by Certicom, - known as the "Security Builder FIPS Module."
Getting it certified was really just using the existing certification on a new platform - which only requires a security policy update, some known answer tests, and a run through of the self-testing framework (in some cases - the NIST is funny about that). No code review and not a lot of approved lab time is required for a platform port as long as the hardware is similar and software stays the same.
That's how they got it in and out of NIST in 3 months!
Uh, maybe because this course is for those seeking their 1 credit hour of computer science required to graduate - and likely the only language most of these folks will *ever* see or use is Javascript.
I think it's a fantastic idea actually. Yes, JS is convoluted and a bit strange. But, perhaps they will learn a thing or two as they go on to manage their fellow compsci graduates in the future.